I am interested in what determines the amount of bonus one receives. If someone can explain in detail, I would be grateful. I'm wondering what's the logic behind it because I know slackers who got bigger bonuses than good employees.
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When you join a financial institution the best strategy is to negotiate your minimum bonus before you start work. I have seen many people do that at BNYM and I had to do that to retain several employees in the past few years.
A portion of discretionary bonus for senior leaders is based on the diversity of their business line. That must be why BNY recruiters look at the race and gender of people applying for positions. $$$
Managers get a pool of funds to allocate. There is guidance set around max + or - vs the amount received in the prior year, and those thresholds are calibrated based on performance rating. So, if a person exceeds in a particular year and gets a step up in bonus, that tends to set a new baseline for the next year. If you get a did not meet expectations, you can bet you're not getting a bonus, and then that tends to have the effect of resetting the baseline bonus for future years...hard to claw your way back to where it was if this occurs due to the max + or - from prior years. Things can change, and nobody's bonus is a guarantee.
Your manager gets a certain amount to divy up between the whole team. For someone to get more, someone else has to get less.
Managers are allocated a bonus pool (no one really knows how much or what bkack box calculations are done to decide the amount). They give their closest minion the largest bonus and what they believe they can get away with to the people that actually do the most work. So they don't quit. Whatever is left for members of their team they don't really care about the "it was a tough year" story. Whomever is left after that is does not meets or laid off.
Slackers with good bonuses are usually long time friends of the team’s manager and invariably slack by networking and gossiping. In this organizational pattern the slacker is invariably a long time close and trusted friend of the manager.